Alice Sebold Biography

Author

Born c. 1963, in Madison, WI; daughter of a Spanish professor and a
journalist; married Glen David Gold (an author), November, 2001.
Education:
Earned degree from Syracuse University, 1984; attended the University of
Houston, c. 1984-85; University of California—Irvine, M.F.A., 1998.

Career

Adjunct instructor in English at Hunter College, and research analyst in
New York City, c. 1985-93; published a memoir,
Lucky,
1999; debut novel
The Lovely Bones
published, 2002; film rights to
The Lovely Bones
sold for a film project set to be released in 2007.

Awards:
Bram Stoker Award for best first novel for
The Lovely Bones,
2002.

Sidelights

Alice Sebold's debut novel,
The Lovely Bones,
dominated the best-seller lists for several months in 2002. The story of
a murdered teenager who observes her grieving family and the impact the
crime had on everyone involved, Sebold's literary tour-de-force
struck a chord with readers, garnered impressive reviews, and sold 2.5
million copies in hardcover—a new record for a first-time novelist.

Alice Sebold

In an article solely devoted to this publishing phenomenon of the year,
New York Times
writer Bill Goldstein called Sebold's novel "the literary
equivalent of that other word-of-mouth success
My Big Fat Greek Wedding,
" and included it in a roster of several other recent novels, more
literary in spirit than purely potboiler, that had also climbed to the top
of the best-seller lists. Such books, Goldstein asserted, were "a
trend that appears to be blurring the boundaries of literary and
commercial fiction." Sebold, for her part, was elated by all the
attention. "I've been such a miserable failure my whole
life," she enthused in an
Entertainment Weekly
interview with Karen Valby, "this feels great!"

Born in the early 1960s, Sebold spent her formative years in suburban
Philadelphia. Her mother was a journalist for a local paper, while her
father was a professor of Spanish at the Ivy-League University of
Pennsylvania. She had an older sister who excelled in school, and while
Sebold was also a good student, she was the self-admitted joker in her
family. It was a way of coping with the stress inside the household, which
she dissected years later in her memoir,
Lucky.
Her parents were undemonstrative, and her mother suffered from panic
attacks and endured a secret drinking problem for a number of years.
Because her parents were more intellectual
than their neighbors in their upper-middle-class world, Sebold recalled
that they were considered somewhat "weird," a tag that
followed her into college.

Sebold chose to attend Syracuse University—in part to distance
herself from her family—and it was there, near the end of her
freshman year, that she was attacked while walking back to her dormitory
on the evening of the last day of school for the year. She struggled with
her assailant, but was badly beaten and bloodied. After sexually
assaulting her in a tunnel that was once the stage entrance to a
now-closed amphitheater, he let her go. She managed to make it back to her
dorm, and was taken from there to a local hospital. When she gave the
police her account of the rape, one cop told her that the tunnel had been
the site of where a young woman was once murdered and dismembered, and
made the offhand remark that Sebold was "lucky" to have
walked away.

Sebold's rapist was caught, convicted, and given a maximum prison
sentence, but the ordeal was far from over. She recounts in
Lucky,
her 1999 memoir centered around the experience, that she lost friends
over it, and that even her father was disdainful that she had not put up
more enough of a struggle. Somewhat surprisingly, Sebold returned to
school in Syracuse, and after graduating headed to the University of
Houston for a brief attempt at graduate school. She eventually settled in
New York City, where she planned to become a writer. For years, she lived
in the East Village—during its rattiest period, before it was an
acceptable post-college, bar-and-restaurant-filled enclave—while
working as a research analyst and teaching English as an adjunct
instructor at Hunter College on the side. She wrote fiction and poetry,
but her submissions were met with rejection. It took her several years to
emerge from her post-assault experience, she admitted, and recalled her
20s as a period in which she dated the wrong men, drank too much, snorted
heroin for three years, and took part in daring stunts like climbing to
the top of the Manhattan Bridge.

Finally, Sebold wrote a
New York Times
article about her rape, which led to an appearance on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
A sentence from her article was quoted a few years later in a book called
Trauma and Recovery,
about post-traumatic stress disorder. As she explained in an interview
with the
Guardian
's Katharine Viner, reading that book was a turning point in her
life. "I was failing miserably in New York, I'd written two
novels that weren't published," she recalled. "And I
realized I was quoted in the 'trauma' section of the book,
but not in 'recovery.'" She found a therapist, and
spent the next three years coming to terms with the assault. Finally, she
decided to leave New York City after nearly a decade there. This was
around 1994, and her plan was to move to California. "I
couldn't handle the rejection and the failure anymore and the
'almost' of it all," she told Valby in the
Entertainment Weekly
interview about her decision. "Everybody from New York has their
almost-but-not-quite story, and I just felt like I don't want to be
walking around on the planet trotting out mine."

Sebold applied to graduate school in California, but was determined to
relocate no matter what. "If I didn't get in I was going to
buy a dozen nude-colored panty hose and get an office job in Temecula,
California," she said in the interview with Valby. Accepted into
the master of fine arts writing program at the University of
California's Irvine campus, she took out a student loan, and met
her future husband on the first day of school. She earned her M.F.A. in
1998, and a year later
Lucky
was published by Scribner. Its title, of course, was the word that the
police officer had used in an attempt to console her. The work earned good
reviews, with
Publishers Weekly
describing it as a "fiercely observed memoir about how an incident
of such profound violence can change the course of one's
life," but failed to catch on with readers. After disappointing
sales of about 14,000 in hardcover, it was not even released in paperback.

Yet Sebold had already started the manuscript that would become her first
published novel,
The Lovely Bones.
She felt compelled to chronicle her own traumatic experience first, she
told Christina Patterson in an interview that appeared in London's
Independent.
"When I felt a sense of polemic entering the novel, I realised
that I had to get myself out of there," she admitted. Finally, she
finished
The Lovely Bones
manuscript, and it netted her a two-book deal with Little, Brown. As
advance copies began circulating in the months prior to its June of 2002
publication date, a publishing-industry and bookseller buzz began to
attach to it.

The Lovely Bones
is told in the first-person voice of Susie Salmon, who tells readers in
the book's second sentence, "I was fourteen when I was
murdered on December 6, 1973." She recounts the crime in horrific
detail: being lured by a sinister neighbor to a field, then sexually
assaulted. She fought back, but was no match for the man she knew as Mr.
Harvey. "I wept," Susie recalls. "I began to leave my
body; I began to inhabit the air and silence. I wept and struggled so I
would not feel."

Police never find Susie's remains, save for an elbow, for Harvey
had put her body inside a safe and buried it in quicksand. Susie
chronicles the posthumous events from above—the police
investigation, her father's belief that the culprit was indeed
their neighbor, the grief and detachment that drives her mother into an
adulterous affair and abandonment of Susie's teenage sister and
very young brother. In heaven, Sebold reveals, "life" is
somewhat better. Apparently the afterlife is tailored to the desires of
the individual, and Susie's is a teenage girl's version of
heaven: she goes to school, but there are no teachers, and the textbooks
are fashion magazines. She lives in duplex with a friend, has unlimited
access to peppermint ice cream, and there are also lots of dogs around. An
"intake counselor" serves as her new mentor in the
afterlife, and Franny helps Susie realize that she is not in heaven quite
yet, and must first break the chains to her earthly relationships. The
Salmons eventually reknit the fabric of their family together, Harvey
comes to a violent end, and Susie's best friend discovers she has a
strong ability to connect with the departed.

Reviewing
The Lovely Bones
in the
New York Times,
Michiko Kakutani gave it high praise. "What might play as a
sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this
volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love," Kakutani
noted, "and how it endures and changes over time." The
Times
' notoriously frank critic did concede that the plot falters toward
the end, but "even these lapses do not diminish Ms. Sebold's
achievements: her ability to capture both the ordinary and the
extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental
prose; her instinctive understanding of the mathematics of love between
parents and children; her gift for making palpable the dreams, regrets,
and unstilled hopes of one girl and one family," Kakutani
concluded.

Sebold's debut novel spent weeks on the best-seller list, and
Little, Brown even ponied up funds for a television advertising
campaign—a rare occurrence for a first-time fiction writer. For
several weeks,
The Lovely Bones
outsold competition that included titles from Nicholas Sparks, Stephen
King, and Tom Clancy, and was selling at the rate of a million copies a
month at one point. Perhaps more impressively, it had not even enjoyed the
boost of being included in television personality Oprah Winfrey's
hitmaking book club, either. A writer for London's
Guardian
newspaper, Ali Smith, theorized about the appeal of Sebold's book
for American readers. "Perhaps the reason," Smith noted,
"is something to do with the aftermath of public mourning after
[the 2001 terrorist attacks], the reassurance and satisfaction of being
able to hear the voice of the gone and to piece together the future after
cataclysm."

The Lovely Bones
was optioned for film, and in early 2005 the director of the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy, Peter Jackson, signed on to the project. Creating the
"heaven" from which Susie tells her story was a challenge
for any filmmaker without resorting to fluffy clouds or other potentially
ludicrous imagery, but Jackson had also done
Heavenly Creatures,
a cult-classic New Zealand film from earlier in his career based on a
true story of two teenage girls whose elaborate fantasy life seems to
propel them to commit murder. The film version of
The Lovely Bones
was slated for a late 2007 release.

Sebold spent some of her best-seller earnings on retiling the bathroom of
the home she shares with her husband, Glen David Gold, whose first novel,
Carter Beats the Devil,
was also a literary sensation. They live in Long Beach, California, where
Sebold rises at 3 in the morning to write. She even managed to make a
success out of the disappointing first book,
Lucky
which was reissued in paperback and racked up impressive sales in 2003,
thanks to the success of
The Lovely Bones.
Sebold hoped that, in the end, the aura of shame, of victimhood, that
attached to women who had experienced a traumatic sexual assault would
dissipate. Such an event, she noted, is "a story of survival, which
is actually heroic," she pointed out in the interview with Viner in
the
Guardian.
"The stereotype is that you're always weak or passive or
falling apart—so you don't talk about it because if you do,
people will change their opinion of what you're capable of. When
the truth is that you're probably capable of a lot more if you
survived rape."

Online

User Contributions:

Hi, I'm not sure if you'll ever read this but I hope you do. I'm doing a business letter for my novel study. I read Sebold's book for my novel study and was wondering if you know her address or if the address at the top is still valid. For the business letter that we're doing we either have the option of sending our letter to the author or not and I thought it'd be cool to send mine to Sebold. I really want her to read it. Hope you can get back to me thanks!

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